As in his first book, Petrus Alfonsi and His Medieval Readers (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1993), John Tolan has chosen a major figure in medieval cultural history around whom he builds an analysis of European attitudes toward the Muslim “other.” Here though the author moves beyond the Middle Ages, and in the second half of Saint Francis and the Sultan, he extends his survey from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, all the while remaining focused on representations of a particular event in Francis's life: his meeting at Damietta in September 1219 with the Ayubbid Sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Kâmil Naser al-Din.
Tolan makes it clear that we know nothing about the encounter at Damietta other than that it took place. Our evidence comes from a letter written in February or March 1220 by Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Acre—who was in the crusader camp when Francis arrived—and in a later, slightly modified version, from his Historia Occidentalis (ca. 1223–1225). Tolan's handling of these early texts—along with another eyewitness account—is deft. He shows how the discourse concerning the encounter changed even within the lifetime of a single author. At first de Vitry, a powerful and influential cleric, had misgivings about Francis, hinting that the preacher might be a bit too zealous for his own good and that his mission did little to aid either the Church or the crusade; but in the Historia Occidentalis, where de Vitry recounts the history of the religious orders, the friars minor are given pride of place, and Francis himself is praised for his exemplary preaching and apostolic life. Thus, Tolan concludes, “any attempt to disentangle the ‘real’ Francis from hagiographical convention is doomed to failure” (62).
As Tolan proceeds to pick apart the principal texts and images of this encounter in Franciscan hagiography—the Vita Prima (1228) of Thomas of Celano; a laudatory poem by Henry of Avranches (1229–1230); a panel depicting the scene in the Bardi altarpiece (1240s); the Legenda maiori (1263) of Bonaventure; a fresco in the Basilica of St. Francis at Assisi (late thirteenth century); Angelo Clareno's History of the Seven Tribulations of the Order of Brothers Minor (1326); and Ugolino da Montegiorgio's Deeds of Blessed Francis and his Companions (1327–1337)—we learn not only about the organization of the order and its place within the late medieval Church but also about the evolving nature of medieval spirituality. Throughout, the author adds numerous anecdotes, asides, and observations that will be of especial interest to medievalists.
In the second half of the book, Tolan analyzes a selection of sources that build upon the medieval hagiographies including chronicles, frescos, altar pieces, manuscript illuminations, printed engravings, paintings, and polemical tracts such as Luther's preface to Erasmus Alber's Alcoran of the Franciscans (1542), where he compares the Franciscans to the Muslims and Francis to Muhammad, and Voltaire's Essai sur les mœurs (1756), where al-Kâmil plays the wise, pious, and just ruler known for his goodness and love of science to Francis's unkempt and unlearned fanatic, whom the sultan humours only because he is an object of pity. Francis's modern defenders (for example, the Catholic historian Louis Massignon) are given equal space. Thus we see the tradition unravel in the post-medieval world as the varying representations of the by now emblematic meeting between Christian and Muslim are tracked into the twenty-first century.
Tolan's unpacking of his chosen texts is erudite and thorough. His thoughtful inclusion of translations of the relevant sections of the primary sources, combined with his careful presentation of the works of other historians on the subject, allows the reader to follow the author's lines of argument and come to his or her own conclusions concerning the changing nature of Western attitudes toward Islam.
Having said this, however, and having nothing but the highest regard for Tolan's scholarship, in the end, Saint Francis and the Sultan remains unsatisfying in terms of its conceptual/theoretical approach. In his epilogue—a term, it should be noted, that is usually reserved for concluding remarks in literary works, and which thus has interesting methodological implications—Tolan closes by saying that
“rather than try to find Francis and al-Kâmil behind the multiple deforming mirrors, I have studied the play of light, of reflections between these mirrors… . I cannot proffer a ‘true’ or ‘objective’ version of the encounter at Damietta. I can only observe that modesty behooves the historian who, in gazing into the murky waters of the past, may see above all his own reflection, the image of his hopes and fears. I simply hope that, through this presentation of the game of mirrors concerning the lieu de mémoire of the meeting at Damietta, I have been able to shed a bit of light” (326–27).
The book ends with this sentence fragment and mixed metaphor and it leaves me puzzled. A bit of light on what?
By publishing a series of well-received books on the subject including, most notably, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), and Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), John Tolan has established his position as the leading authority in his generation on Western attitudes toward Islam in the medieval period. And while Saint Francis and the Sultan is of interest for a variety of reasons, as I hope I have indicated, at this stage of his career I was rather waiting for the author's reflections on why such a study is needed now and what it means on a theoretical level, for it says a great deal about the interplay not of mirrors and light but of language, texts, authorship, reading, and culture: and all this needs to be brought out. Indeed, this book is a veritable laboratory for a study in historical theory and textual criticism. Here is hoping that Tolan's future thoughts on the subject will take a turn in this direction.
